Deion Sanders on Travis Hunter ‘he’s better than me’

Not many athletes can say they are better than Deion Sanders—the only person to have played in a Super Bowl and a World Series—a bonafide legend that’s enshrined in all sorts of Hall of Fames.

But Deion, now known to many as Coach Prime, thinks one of his pupils is ahead of where he was back in college… and he might be right. Travis Hunter enters his junior season with the Colorado Buffaloes as a possible Heisman candidate and inarguably as a projected top 10 pick. Sanders a two-time All-American went fifth in the 1989 NFL Draft after an incredible college career at Florida State which was capped off with an eighth-place finish in the 1988 Heisman race. Hunter could equal his coach in All-Americans with a follow-up season this year to his terrific 2023, and if he stays healthy it could mean a real chance at the Heisman too.

That’s because Hunter ended the season with the most snaps played in FBS despite his three-and-a-half game absence, playing 436 snaps on offense, 566 on defense and 30 on special teams to surpass—an average of 115 plays a game. He broke numerous records for his contributions on both sides of the ball for the Buffs last season. He caught 57 passes for 721 yards and five touchdowns on offense while making 30 tackles and snagging three picks on defense.

What most people tend to forget is that his all-athlete head coach Sanders—who notably played both sides of the ball in the NFL and in additional pro sport in MLB—didn’t play offense and defense when he was playing for the Seminoles.

“Travis is better, at this age and stage he’s better,” Sanders said on Friday of his two-way star.

Despite being a two-sport star, Sanders didn’t truly become a two-way star in football until his fourth season and didn’t seriously play wide receiver besides the 1996 season. That year the Dallas Cowboys used Sanders in place of Hall of Famer Michael Irvin, who fought cocaine charges and a collarbone injury. Sanders ended his NFL career with similar stats to Hunter at CU this year, snagging 60 catches for 784 yards and three offensive touchdowns. Of course, Sanders is also one of the best returners in NFL history, taking back six kicks in his career.

Hunter hasn’t added the returning to his game but he’s gotta catch his breath at some point, which Sanders has said he’s the best person to monitor.

“He’s a good human being, he’s not smoking, not drinking, not outside whoring, not doing crazy things,” Sanders said. “He’s got one of the highest GPAs on the team, he’s a great human being, and he can play, his character is second to none. That’s why I don’t mind fishing with him. And he coming to Texas. And we’re not talking about fishing on the boat, although we talk junk to each other all the time, but we’re talking about life. We’re talking about the next move. We talk about land acquisition. We’re talking about so many different things of life, fathering, you know, loving, how the family plays a role in all of this. So it’s just a delight to have caught him coming straight out of high school.”

Hunter has another year to prove he can do something we haven’t really seen before—play two sides of the ball all game in modern high-level football. Nobody knows if he will try to do this in the NFL or what that will look like, so cherish the next dozen Buffs games because we might not see anything like Hunter for a long time.